The harsh reality is that preserving the Amazon is very, very hard, and we got bigger fish to fry right now.

The Facts:

1. The Brazilian State can barely control its largest cities, much less distant areas where "the authorities" is literally four dudes and a squad car. Sometimes there is squad car, sometimes there are not four dudes, just one. Sometimes there is no dude. We can watch it happening in real time with satelittes, but that means shit if you can't go there, fine and arrest people.

2. The region is a mess. I have said it before - that part of the region is a mess. Its a Wild West frontier, a Cowboy movie with 100% humidity, constant raining and jungle instead of desert.

3. The country is poor and in an economic crisis. Many simple, poor rural dwellers migrate elsewhere to find better lives.

4. The other states have an old love for dumping random unwanted and undesired people in the region. First they dumped north-easterners during WWII to be part of the "Rubber Battalions" gathering rubber for the Allied War Effort. Then they left those people to dry, very much, and these people stayed (I suspect my father's family from my grandmother, is descended from those people). Then they dumped more northeasterners after the Belém-Brasilia was built, as a way of "fixing" land conflicts in the Northeast.

Then Maranhão, a neighbooring state that spent DECADES ruled by the worst oligarchs in the country, the Sarney Family, decides to dump Maranhenses in my state. You guys have no idea, they were literally trucking people into my state, saying it was a land of plenty, full of jobs and gold and shit. At some point, the southern cities of Pará PROHIBITED vehicles with placards from Maranhão, because they were assumed to be bringing poor randos into their cities.

Then after that, we started getting bigger influx of all sorts of randos from out of the state. Gauchos, Goianos, Pernambucanos, etc.

Now mostly recently, the Belo Monte Hydrodam brought like 60k dudes from the rest of the country.

You can be DAMN SURE that whoever is burning things or taking trees down, its not the locals.

5. Brazil is theorically a country full of people. In practice, it has very uneven demographically. The Rio-São Paulo Megalopolis can be compared to the Boswash area, while most of the country away from the coast is practically devoid of people. For example, I live in that red patch in north-eastern Pará. I could drive a few hours and end up in a place with less popullation density than the Australian outback. Hell, I took a bus to Paragominas (not even that far tbh) and I was surprised at how much empty land and pristine nature there is between the cities.

https://tropicalsmog.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/most-populated-cities-in-brazil-mapsofworld.jpg

6. Legally speaking, the region is a mess.

Most land belongs to the State, which prohibits a lot of stuff to be done there. In practice, there's a lot of people who are constantly fighting for land:

a) Grileiros. In short, people trying to steal land through fake documents and purchases, or just out-right stealing. I remember there was a guy who owned a lot of land, guy owned enough territory to form a decently-sized country. There was just a simple problem - the man never existed. He was a legal fabrication, and when the people who really owned his land needed someone to stand for him, they dragged some old man that claimed he was him

b) Injuns. They got their reserves. Huge-sized reserves. The average injun reserve is big enough to be a country in Europe. They also have small popullations and problems with all sorts of people trying to invade their land. There is also a lot of shady foreign intrusion in their lands. A lot of injuns are also dicks. Some of them are doing exploration contracts of their land, or making people pay tolls to cross their land, and are actually pretty well-off and wealthy. "Indians with Toyotas" is kind of an stereotype here.

c) Landless Movements. In theory, they are people fighting for land and agrarian reform. In practice, they are a bunch of left-wing militants going around the countryside bothering farmers, being thugs and recruiting beggars from the big cities to have more manpower. One of their classic dick movies is to invade farms, harvest the entire protected area forest, sell the wood and leave. By the time the farm is back in the hands of the owners, they have a land devoid of forest, and a nice fine coming their way. These people never face legal repercussions for their acts, mainly because juridically speaking, they generally do not exist.

d) Garimpeiros AKA Prospectors. People searching for valuable minerals in the ground. The Amazon is one of, if not THE most mineral-rich region. It is the reason for greed, for both locals and foreigners alike:

Subtitle:
- Gold
- Tin
- Niobium
- Oil, Natural Gas
- Potassium
- Limestone
- Manganese
- Iron
- Aluminium
- Diamond
- Chromium
- Lignite (AKA Brown Coal
- Uranium
https://sites.google.com/site/auroratreze/minerais_no_amazonas.jpg